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Sovereign Games
Personal blog · unessays.substack.comaiculture
Sovereign Games is a personal blog at unessays.substack.com about ai and culture. Since 2026, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Talk Is Cheap: The Operational Impact of LLM Use”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this Substack's breakdown of the Faros AI report on developer productivity, which argues that individual AI coding gains are offset by slower system-wide flow and declining software quality.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
On harmony, flow, connection, and all the places they show up. Launched 8 months ago.
Most-linked posts?
- Talk Is Cheap: The Operational Impact of LLM Use3 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2026-05-31
What Hacker News says?
> but no comments about the software quality, which for a lot of SaaS has gone downhill. It’s why they emphasized LoC and number of PRs but hide the number of bug tickets. And here's some numbers (gathered from telemetry over time) showing that: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways Here's someone's breakdown (with some things from the full report that aren't in the Faros blog post), showing h…
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs”Submitted Talk Is Cheap: The Operational Impact of LLM Use as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYou may be interested in this report from earlier this year: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways And a breakdown of it that gives a bit of an alternate explanation of their numbers (and more closely matches what we're seeing IMO): https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap Short version is that what you, I, and other responses to you are seeing is backed up by the numbers: AI code generat…
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive”Submitted Country of Kaleidoscopes in a Datacenter as a story · 1 points
HN discussion>Understanding what is going on with AI productivity is … frustrating to say the least. Agreed. I think one of the hardest things about it is that productivity != value. You can push all the code you want, but if it's not driving revenue up or cost down, it doesn't matter economically. Here is the best data I've been able to find. An observational study of 4000 teams over 2 years across many different organizations.…
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration”March 2026: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways Faros would tell you shops are shipping 16% more PRs with heavy AI use. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap I think that's wrong because it doesn't adequately account for the quality and rework their data show.
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration”I think its worse than that. I admit that if a small team or an individual uses an LLM, it's likely they can create value faster. I think as soon as you don't own the responsibility for the defects you generate with an LLM, their use starts to destroy value. Regardless of product maturity. This is what I think the data says. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “AI Is Slowing Down”There is an observational study that was published in March 2026 that followed 4000 teams over 2 years. It shows, in my view, exactly that the productivity gains don't translate into economic value. Here is the report: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways And my commentary: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “AI Is Slowing Down”Productivity is not value. It's quite possible for you to experience productivity improvements, and actual value to not be created. That is what I think the most robust data is showing. https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “AI Is Slowing Down”This is the most interesting study I’ve seen: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap Funny enough, it basically says the exact same thing about software engineering that TFA says about science: First - developer level productivity has improved … Second - overall system flow has slowed down at every step
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “AI Boosts Research Careers but Flattens Scientific Discovery”>you took a single report that agreed with your statistics These are not my statistics. I'm not affiliated with Faros at all. I built an analysis on top of their reporting. And, it's also not one report. DORA has tracked statistics with respect to throughput and quality as well. Those indicators are flat for throughput and negative for quality. The throughput flatness is also supported by the shovelware data. I disc…
Comment linking /p/how-im-thinking-about-the-value-of
on “Policy on the AI Exponential”Are we plotting against cost? How is the capability advancement vs dollars paid for development? By my read of the (very sparse) data, we're getting linear improvements in capability for super-linear increases in costs. [1] Indicates that by 2027 models will cost $1 billon to train. Dario estimates that model runs will cost $10 billion in 2026 [2]. That to me indicates costs are potentially growing faster than capab…
Comment linking /p/talk-is-cheap
on “Policy on the AI Exponential”